Jared Platt - Documentary Wedding Photographer

In this episode of The Photography Lounge, your host Alastair Jolly sits down with Jared Platt and they discuss the nuances that make him describe himself as a documentary wedding photographer and not a wedding photojournalist.

Jared grew up in a small, rural, town in Arizona and fondly reminisces about some of the unique daily occurrences at school. Initially dreaming of being a rock star then starting out as a Theatre major he quickly realised his path actually lay in the world of photography.

Jared is recognised throughout the photography industry as one of the leading educators in process and workflow. His foundations in commercial photography and his experience of the transition to digital have led him to focus on how the power of all the amazing tools we have at our disposal today can only be unleashed with the right focus on process and workflow.

As a father, the conversation turns to how to find a good work-life balance and how his use of good processes and workflows allow him to spend quality time with family rather than being tied to the editing suite.

You can find out more about the tutorial that Jared made together with Profoto here:
https://profoto.com/us/academy/courses/wedding/fundamentals-of-wedding-photography

Learn more about Jared:
Website: https://jaredplatt.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaredplatt/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jaredplatt

Find out all about the features SmugMug & Flickr have to offer at:
https://www.smugmug.com/
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Transcript

Alastair Jolly: It's time for another episode of that photography show brought to you by SmugMug and Flickr, and this is your Alastair Jolly.

Hi, it's  Alastair here, and to today’s episode is a conversation I've been looking forward to having for a really long time. Today’s guest is an incredible wedding photographer who's also at home photographing portraits and indeed commercial work. I first met him at trade shows and conferences where his flair for teaching, his effortless style, his deep knowledge of his craft has led him to be one of the most sought-after educators in the industry.

He also happens to have a most amazingly polished and comprehensive workflow, which quite frankly leaves most of us in awe. It's the one and only Jared Platt. Welcome, Jared.

Jared Platt: Thank you. Nice to be here. 

Alastair Jolly: It's a pleasure, as I said I have been really looking forward to catching up with you and having this conversation.

Alastair Jolly: We'll start off with how you describe yourself. You described yourself as a documentary photographer. Is that correct? And what do you mean by that?

Jared Platt: Well, I remember, okay, I'm going to start with that story apparently. So, they still exist. Do you know the WPJA? Do you know that? 

Alastair Jolly: I'm not sure. 

Jared Platt: Okay. So, the WPJA is Wedding Photojournalist Association. And when I started wedding photography, I wanted to be in the WPJA. Right. That was, to me, that was, that was it.

It, you know, for, it's really just a way for someone who wants a wedding, quote-unquote for photojournalist. It's a way for someone to find those people that identify, self-identify, as a wedding photojournalist. So, I got on and you, you have to pay to be on it, but you also have to be legitimately a photojournalist cause they're kind of uppity that way.

Like if you're not, we won't let you on. And so, I got into the WPJA and I was paying my fee every year and I was, you can send your images in for print con, not print competition, but image competition. Right. And then they choose like winners and stuff like that. So I, it was all important. Yeah. So, I was part of the WPJA and I was proud to be a photojournalist.

And then I guess periodically they check your website to make sure you're still legitimately a photojournalist. And they have some pretty strict rules, like you can't have edited a photo too much and you can't use like. Silly, Instagram. Instagram wasn't a thing at the time, but Instagram ish kind of gimmicks and, and so they're very.

Very strict. 

Alastair Jolly: So really leaning on ensuring that it’s photojournalism. 

Jared Platt: Yeah. They wanted legitimate photojournalists to be on this, and they were serious about trying to create this brand of photojournalists. Nowadays, I don't think that they're all that concerned about that because you go on there now, and those are, those don't seem to apply.

So, one Christmas. Every Christmas, my wife comes up with part of Christmas song that then I have to make a portrait for our family based on that Christmas song. And then, and sometimes it requires a lot of Photoshop and it comes like this big thing. And I think that year it was about. It was a little gingerbread man, and somehow it was about run, run as fast as you can, or I don't know.

So anyway, but the idea behind the photograph was that our kids were dressed like little gingerbread men and they had escaped from the cookie platter. And so I photographed it such that there's this cookie platter on the kitchen counter and there's two spots where the cookies are gone and these little kids are running away.

Across the counter, away from the cookie platter. And that was our Christmas card for that year. And every year I would post that as the front picture on my website for like Christmas Eve, Christmas day, all the way until like January 1st and then I would, you know, take it down. That got me kicked out of the WPJA.

Alastair Jolly: They just so happened to check your website while that was there. 

Jared Platt: They happened to look at my website on that day. And they were like, this guy uses Photoshop and does like silly little Christmas cards. He's not a photojournalist. So they kicked me out of the WPJA. They like wrote me a letter and like, I'm sorry, your photography is photoshopped and blah, blah, blah.

So I got kicked out all of that story, which. That's why I got kicked out of the WPJA all that story to realize that I'm not a photojournalist at all because a photojournalist is someone who shows up and takes photographs, good or bad. They've tried to tell the truth and try and like inform you as to what happened at this location.

If the people look ugly, they look ugly, and if they look good, they look good, and chances are if you're a photojournalist, you're actually trying to make people. Look bad because if it bleeds, it leads 

Alastair Jolly: sensationalism, 

Jared Platt: right? There's a sensationalist idea to it. So, so a wedding photojournalist is a really bad term.

A wedding documentary photographer is a much better term for it because the documentary person, someone who's making a documentary, they're making a documentary, but they have a purpose. They have a goal in mind, and they're probably either pro or con, whatever it is, they're there and they're fine with showing that pro or con.

They will tip their hand and say, you know, we believe this. You know, any documentary you see, it has a positive or a negative spin to it. Generally speaking, 

Alastair Jolly: They care, but what that story is that they are trying to tell.

Jared Platt: they care about the story 

Alastair Jolly: and whether it's good or bad, 

Jared Platt: they care about it and they're willing to work the story and the visuals and the elements to tell the best version of that story.

So as a documentary film photographer, I might go in and video a recreation of what happened, or I might go in and make sure that the place is a little cleaned up before I do the interview. I'm not just walking in and just turning the camera on. A wedding photojournalist is a really bad term, but a wedding documentary, documentarian is a good term.

And so for me, I care about my subject. I care that I tell the story in the most positive light, but I also want it to feel very real. And I don't want to be in the way of the actual story. I don't want to take away from it. And I think a lot of wedding photographers, especially if you're portrait heavy or if you spend a lot of time, and I do some pretty serious portraits with lights and all that kind of stuff on a wedding day, but my portrait session is very short.

I'm not going to spend a ton of time. I just finished a wedding in California on my way here to WPPI. As normal the bride was running behind schedule and makeup was taking too long and all that kind of stuff. So, so instead of an hour for portraits for the group, it was a 15 minute drive to where the portraits were as a 15 minute drive back.

So we had a half hour to do portraits for family, group portraits, bride and groom, bride alone, groom alone. 

Alastair Jolly: Yeah. 

Jared Platt: But I'm okay with that because my goal as a wedding photographer is not to have an extended photo shoot, and it's not to make images for my portfolio. It's to create a lasting document of what happened that day and of the people that showed up that day.

That's it. That's my, that's my job. And if I can tell that in a beautiful, wonderful way. Great. That's the goal. 

 Alastair Jolly: Capture that story. But as a documentary, you also care that it's beautiful and reflecting the joy. 

Jared Platt: that's right. To tell a story that's real. But I'm also trying to tell it in a way that is pleasing to the person that I'm working for.

And it's interesting to someone who doesn't even care about that particular person, and they're willing to watch or look at the images regardless of who they are. So, I think it's a better term. Even though I will take portraits, I'm very much more interested in the story of the wedding and making sure that the wedding is about a wedding and then I don't interfere with the process of the wedding getting done.  

right, right. It's, it's their day, not my day. And I see a lot of times where someone gets so excited about the photos they're taking, and I understand cause they're beautiful and the bride looks great and whatever. And they, so they try and hang on to them for an extra half hour or an extra 10 minutes.

Now the steak is cold at the wedding, you know, chef's upset. Or the mother of the bride is upset because they had this thing planned or whatever. My goal is to stay on time to get as beautiful image as I can during the time I have, and then after that I'll just document. And I always tell my brides, I'm like, look, you can give me 10 minutes for wedding portraits, or you can give me an hour or two hours and I'm still going to get great images.

They're just going to be different images. I'm either going to get portraits or I'm going to get documentary shots of what's happening. Yeah. One way or the other, I'm going to get beautiful portraits. They're just going to be different. 

Alastair Jolly: Yeah. And you're going to have a wonderful day. 

Jared Platt: Right. And you are never going to be. Stressed out or an uncomfortable or annoyed or bored from photos because all you have to do is look at me and say, Hey, Jared, I'm kind of done with portraits. Great. 

Alastair Jolly: But you probably are at that point as well. 

Jared Platt: Right. So, yeah. 

Alastair Jolly: Well, so capturing these beautiful stories, how long have you been capturing the stories for, for couples?

Jared Platt: I began photographing weddings when I was in college, and that was over 25 years ago. So I've been doing it for a quarter of a century. Most of the ones that I shot in college were like friends, weddings, friends of friends. So I started getting paid to do these things, but it was like, it was during the film days. It was. 10 rolls of film, you know, or whatever.

And that, that was all I did. So I wasn't, I don't think I considered myself a full-fledged professional with a business until I was probably until about 2000. And in 2000 I think that's when I could legitimately say, I have a business. I am a wedding photographer. That's my business. Yeah. 

Alastair Jolly: We have a very similar background.

I was a wedding photographer for nearly 20 years before I joined SmugMug. You know, again, started while I was studying at school and started in film. So I'm guessing from what you just said there, you probably weren't studying photography where you, 

Jared Platt: I was. I'll back up. I was studying musical theater.

I was going to be a musical theater actor. That was kind of where I was going, but I took a photo class. The fact that I love the photo class and that I thought that the theater people were a little bit too strange for me. The two things together. I ended up being a photography major. 

Alastair Jolly: No offense to any musical theatre majors out there.

Jared Platt: It's just that I wasn't able to be as weird as they are. Right. You know, cause it takes a certain amount of, you have to be able to pretend. Better than everybody else. And I was not able to pretend all the time, like I couldn't live in a pretend world. And so, you know, they're always playing theater games.

And I was like, that was back in high school. I can't do that now. I've lost that kid. like nature. I think a good actor or actress never loses the kid, like imaginary nature. And I had lost that. So, I decided I would be better behind the camera instead of front, because I don't have to emote all the time.

Alastair Jolly: Yeah. So did you switch then? 

Jared Platt: Yeah, so then I switched. I became a, I was a photographic major, so I studied it. I got a BFA in photography, and then my master's degree is in the history of photography, writing and research and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. So it became, it became a passion enough that I didn't just like doing it.

I like talking about it. Okay. I loved, I would, I would rather talk about photography than do it, which is a little weird.

Alastair Jolly: That's why we have you on the podcast dude. Exactly. 

Jared Platt: That's why I'm here. I love talking about it. 

Alastair Jolly: I studied as an engineer, 

Jared Platt: mechanical or electrical?

Alastair Jolly: Structural. Yeah. I actually fell into an elective that you could choose each semester as an extra credit and started doing photography and got completely hooked and almost dropped out of engineering because I spent so much time in photography classes I wasn't supposed to be in. Um, and then very quickly after becoming an engineer, realized I was making more money at the weekends, photographing weddings.

Then these guys were at an engineering job.. 

Jared Platt: Right. Got it. 

Alastair Jolly: Back in the day when photographers could make more money than engineers do. 

Jared Platt: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. That's shifted quite a bit.

Alastair Jolly: as you said maybe 10 rolls of film of the weekend. Take it to the lab and then go play golf. It was a wonderful, wonderful time in the industry. 

Jared Platt: Well, and it's interesting that you mentioned that you would shoot 10 rolls and then you'd take it to the lab and go play golf, because now everybody, and this is kind of where my workflow teaching came in, is everybody stopped taking their film to the lab and had they became the lab themselves.

Alastair Jolly: Suddenly had to process it. 

Jared Platt: And now they're, it's almost like they've got their own dark room and they have to be enslaving themselves inside of their dark room. And so they can't go play golf and they can't go hang out with their kids and they can't, can't do anything because they're so busy with all of their processing.

Yeah. And so they, that's just a matter of little bit of extra discipline, but also just an understanding of what the proper pathway is. Critical path for accomplishing something quickly and efficiently and with quality. And so that's where I kind of started teaching was because I realized as I was in this industry where people were floundering.

I realized that I had some knowledge that other people didn't have, and I could solve that problem for them and help them get back on the path of doing things quickly. 

Alastair Jolly: We'll get into some of that education stuff, but let's, let's continue with the, the background of Jared. Where were you at school? 

Jared Platt: I was at Arizona State University, so, 

Alastair Jolly: but are you Arizona born and bred?

Jared Platt: Yeah. I grew up in Northern Arizona. I was, I was on a little tiny, tiny, tiny town. I think there's, at most, there's 2,500 people in it. My wife now teaches at a high school that has 4,000 kids in it. So almost twice as many kids as my entire town had people, you know, I graduated with a class of 89 people, I think.

So just a minimal, a little tiny town. There was, I grew up, so you go to the high school. And that's the stuff that movies are made of, but you go to the high school and there's, there would be kids, one of my friends would show up to high school and he was his family farmed. He would show up with a truck with a really huge trailer on it and an enormous hog in the truck that he then after high school, after school that day would have to take two.

Wherever. I don't know if he's taken it to the slaughterhouse or if he's taking it to the fair or whatever, but it would just park. 

Alastair Jolly: Oh, he would leave it there all day while he was in school?

Jared Platt: bus sized truck, and you know, it was like the size of a bus with this truck and this trailer, and then this enormous hog that's the size of a horse sitting in this, and it would just sit there all day waiting for him.

And then he'd come out, get in his truck and take it wherever he was supposed to take it after, you know, and then other kids would show up with their trucks and they'd have a bale of hay. And like a cow head stick, you know, like a stick with a fake cow head on it. And they would, at lunchtime they would throw the bale of hay out and they'd stick that cow head on it and they'd rope at lunchtime.

Alastair Jolly: it's a very different world from the one I grew up in. 

Jared Platt: What was your world. 

Alastair Jolly: Oh, no. Well, I was born in Glasgow in Scotland, a major city, but I've always lived in the suburbs. I mean, they live in the country a little bit, so, but we certainly didn't rope cattle at school. That's for sure. I 

Jared Platt: So you grew up in the, in the countryside of Scotland? Which is beautiful. 

Alastair Jolly: It's a very beautiful part of the world.

Jared Platt: I know. I can't think of a better, more beautiful place than Scotland. It speaks to me. It's the kind of. You know, a lot of people, you know, they want to go to like the grand Tetons. That to them is a landscape. But to me, Scotland is, it's a landscape that's hauntingly vacant, but gorgeously.

Yeah. I mean it's just so beautiful, 

Alastair Jolly: beautiful, very dramatic weather. It's a great photo location, but let's not tell anybody cause we want to keep it quiet. 

Jared Platt: We want to keep it that way. I remember we went; I was teaching workshop or a lecture up in the UK. They have that, it's called SWPP. Yeah. So I was teaching there.

And so my wife came and my brother in law and sister-in-law came and, and we, afterwards, we went tools around and we went up to Scotland and we went up to where they filmed Skyfall. That is right up in those thoughts is so beautiful. Yeah. It was in the winter and it was beautiful 

Alastair Jolly: It is beautiful SWPP is a bit like WPPI 

Jared Platt: English version of WPPI.

Alastair Jolly: Yeah. The society of wedding and portrait professionals. 

Jared Platt: I love, love Scotland, but it's just that haunting. 

Alastair Jolly: If you come back, let's catch up there. I'm very fortunate that despite working for SmugMug, which is based in San Francisco, I managed to work remote from Scotland, which is a Testament to the modern world we live in.

Jared Platt: Yeah. Still live in the motherland and 

Alastair Jolly: yeah. Yeah. But I have a whole photographic career based in Scotland, which, it's a tough place as a wedding photographer, you know, the, the weather is not mostly not on your side. 

It's a beautiful part of the world. So you grew up in a really rural part of Arizona is probably not the perfect place to be awaiting photography for then?

Jared Platt: is it, no, I don't. I don't think anybody has ever gotten married in St John's. 

Alastair Jolly: Right. 

Jared Platt: You know, they get married in other places and then they live in St John's. I started shooting, you know, when I was in college at down at ASU, so I was in Phoenix. Yeah. And that's a major metropolitan area. So I have plenty of clients there.

Alastair Jolly: But you travel a lot?

Jared Platt: I do travel. Quite a bit. I've, I've tried to pull back on that cause my kids are, I need to be around my kids a lot more so that, that kind of gets difficult when you travel to shoot you travelled to teach, you know, it gets too much. 

Alastair Jolly: Actually, let's talk about that because something I'd focus very much and one of the reasons I stopped being a wedding photographer and moved, moved into marketing with SmugMug was my work-life balance. I was shooting back in the day up to 50 weddings a year. It was too much. But this was before you had to do engagement shoots and you know, you, you may be just showed up, you showed up, you photograph them arriving at the church, you were done by the meal.

I think, you know, miss of those days. Um, you know, which was great. I would shoot maybe on a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, some weeks. And as I mentioned earlier, hand in the rule of films on a Monday to the lab. And then have this wonderful period of the week where I could meet some clients, but I could also spend time with my two young kids and my wife.

Uh, but then I became very aware that suddenly they were going to be at school all week and I was going to be out all weekend. And that kind of prompted me to kinda change path a little bit. So here you are 25 something years into your business. You have children, you have a wife. How do you keep that balanced and how do you keep it real with the family?

Jared Platt: Well, I have a particular challenge because not only do I have this wedding business, but I also have teaching and that's a business. Yeah. So I do a lot of that kind of stuff, and that takes me away from the family more than does wedding photography.

Alastair Jolly: because it's probably for more than one day actually  

Jared Platt: for a week, or I've got to go three days or something.

And so that travel really has kind of affected that work-life balance. But for me, the key was I know that I am going to be gone from my family on the weekend shooting a wedding, so I just need to make sure that whatever I'm doing. With the processing of that wedding doesn't take me away from them the rest of the week.

You know, and, and obviously I, I've kind of pulled back and I don't shoot as many weddings. I, I used to shoot about 30 a year and now I shoot maybe eight. 10 something like that. Um, but I, I'm more picky and choosy about what I shoot, but that's if I can, if I can accomplish my post-production quickly in the process of doing the wedding, then being away from my family for Saturdays, not as difficult, but as my kids have gotten older and they've gotten into sports and stuff, like all that stuff happens on Saturday.

And so my wife is really the one who experiences that. So I started to notice that like you did as, as my kids started getting older, and so I started to diversify so that I was actually working on Monday through Friday. In other avenues. So commercial work, portraits and senior portraits and things like that so that I didn't have to take as many weddings and that allowed me to go from back in 2007/2006 I was shooting the 30/35 weddings a year.

That allowed me to start cutting back on the number of weddings because I didn't have to chase after every single wedding.  I could then, you know, do make the same amount of money on a commercial job during the week and now I probably shoot, I don't know that I would say I shoot more commercial work than I do weddings, but I, I probably make more money off of commercial photography than I do off of wedding photography now, simply because I've kind of shifted a little bit.

I'm doing more stuff during the weekdays with commercial clients, portrait clients, and I do less. And I think that's the natural. Order of things anyway. I think as people get older, they probably are losing a little bit of touch with the bride who's younger. And so probably it's best that those of us who shoot weddings by the time we're 50 are shooting mostly other things and less weddings.

And I'm not 50 yet, but you know, I'll be there sometime and uh, and I don't want to, I don't want to be in a position where I ever am not in tune to the client. Yeah. I have noticed that most of my brides are now older brides, so instead of a, it used to be when I was in my thirties and late twenties. My brides were the younger brides between 20 and 25 ish, and now my brides are professionals who are oftentimes paying for their own wedding.

They already have a job. They're already through college, so I'm not doing weddings for as many young brides that are still in college or just out of college. Usually, they are, you know, 30 28 27. Or they're 40 you know, and they're on a second wedding or whatever. So I have a lot more older clients now, even weddings because I.

I think I relate with them better. 

Alastair Jolly: It seems like that's the natural order of how things that should go. When you're younger you can relate, then likewise, when you're older, you can relate with the needs of that age group at that time. And you also still have to enjoy it and be able to relate. Because it's a hard enough job.  So, you know, I used to know photographers that hated photographing weddings. I have no understanding of how they can do it. It's so difficult. 

Jared Platt: Right. 

Alastair Jolly: Even when you love it. 

Jared Platt: Yeah, that's right. It's, it's backbreaking work. It's difficult to do. It's, I mean, it's, when you're done, you're done. Yeah. The end of the day you are, you're exhausted, and if you didn't like what you were doing, I can't even imagine. These days I tend to look at a wedding and I think this is going to be a lot of work. Like I. It's not like I'm just going to run into it because I'm, I'm a little older. I'm a little creakier 

Alastair Jolly: need to warm up or pull the muscle. 

Jared Platt: And so, so I go in and I'm like, Oh, I gotta warm-up for this thing. But I still love the experience.

I still love the fact that the wedding, to me, the, the most interesting thing about a wedding is that you have. One day, typically six to eight hours to get incredible shots. 40 or 50 amazing shots. Yeah. If you asked a commercial photographer to get 50 amazing shots, all of them different of portraits of a family portrait, a group portrait, a party portrait, a dancing portrait, a ring shot 

Alastair Jolly: architectural. 

Jared Platt: The whole, the commercial photographer say, you're crazy. What are you, what do you think? 

Alastair Jolly: All in a venue that you can't get to choose with lighting, mostly you don't get to choose, weather you don't get to choose and timing that you don't get to choose 

Jared Platt: and you can't just say, well, we're going to set up over here and then we'll move over here.

You know, five shots for a commercial photographer. Great. We did. We have a good day. Five shots for a wedding photographer. You're going to get sued. Yeah. You know? So I think that alone is an incredible thing about photography or wedding photography because it's, it's that opportunity to really challenge yourself.

Can I, in a moment's notice, get an amazing portrait of someone, or can I, with just five minutes to spare, can I get this really awesome shot? Of jewelry, which usually, you know, commercial photographer. I, when I was first out of college, I worked at a commercial studio and one of my clients, that was turned over to me.

I was their photographer was a jewelry company and this jewelry company made these huge, like. It was jewelry for older women, you know that like the big bling jewelry with lots of color in it and stuff like that. So the stones were huge and they were really expensive, and we would bring these stuns in and shooting that kind of jewelry is very difficult because you have to learn the facets, and if a facet is glaring at you, it's a big facet.

Yeah. And so I learned that stuff and we would spend an hour setting up a jewelry shop just to get it just right, which I guess helped me once I started doing a lot of weddings, I was like, Oh, this is easy. I know how to do this because I understand the principles, but only have five minutes to do it.

It's not like I could set it up and shift things around and change it. I just have to know, okay, I need this lens. I need this light. I need this angle in order to get this done. Cause I got five minutes before I got to move on. 

Alastair Jolly: Yeah and all the time being best friend and councilor to a bride. I mean, it's quite clearly a difficult thing to do, but I did love that.

I did love that kind of problem solving, which I guess, you know, coming from an engineering perspective as well. I, I love solving problems and also a wedding day is like a big puzzle.

Jared Platt: You know, I think that the nature of photography is problem solving because you are, no matter what kind of photographer you are. You go into a situation that has problems and you have to choose the right method for solving the problem. So like you're a sports photographer and someone hands you a camera and says, take a picture of that moving stuff over there. Those, those people running up and down that field, you have a problem because you have a certain amount of light and now you have to make a choice.

Which aperture do I use? Which shutter speed and the shutter speed has to be, you know, high enough that it freezes the actions. So that means I have all these other things that happen, you know, and I've got to change the ISO and the f-stop to, to match that. So it's a problem. And then, you know, someone else says, Hey, I want you to take a portrait and I want you to take it in this really bad lighting in Arizona.

It's noon, and I need you to take a beautiful portrait of someone that doesn't look like, you know, she's burning alive in the desert. Right? So there's a challenge. You know, you're in Glasgow and you have to photograph, and it's raining and it's dark, and there's no. All the lights tends to come from the top.

So everybody's got these shadows, big, big shadows in the eyes, but you don't have much equipment with you. How do you solve that? It's all, it's all problem solving. So somebody who's not into problem solving should get out of photography. 

Alastair Jolly: Its problem solving and compromise, right?

Jared Platt: Yeah, you're right. Its problem solving and then being willing to let go of some of the things that you want to do but can't compromise, because you can't.

Yeah. Can't accomplish it that way. So you have to, 

Alastair Jolly: there's the new tagline for the photo industry. Problem solving and compromise. 

Jared Platt: better than politics. Oh, 

Alastair Jolly: gosh. Absolutely. I love what you said about like myself, you know, focusing on family and your kids too, to have a good work life balance.

Uh, and you mentioned that one of the things you've done to do that is really nail your process and your workflow. When I first met you, you were, you were actually giving a talk for us at SmugMug at one of the trade shows. Yeah. Probably here in Vegas, I think actually, and, uh, you were giving a talk on your workflow and although I was at SmugMug, I still was shooting some weddings and.  I thought, if only I could implement half of that my life would be much easier. Well, when did you realize you really had a knack for process and workflow, and what makes you think you're able to do it when so many aren't able to for themselves and need guided on that? 

Jared Platt: Well, I think there's probably several things.

The first, I think when I realized I had a knack for it was because remember I started in this commercial studio. Yeah. And it was at the time where this photographer was changing from film to digital, and so he didn't really know digital. He knew how to take pictures. He was a good photographer, but he didn't understand the computer side of it at all.

And so my job was to make sure that things didn't get lost. Things were exposed correctly, things were sharp, like all that kind of stuff I had to do. And so there, I was told when I took the job, there are only two times you have to be at the studio when the photographer was there and when the photographer was, because it was required for me to be there anytime anybody needed anything.

Right. And so I, and I made a lot of mistakes. Through that transition cause we had to figure it out. So we're figuring out file naming. We're figuring out where to put things, how to organize things, how not to lose files, how to back them up. All of that stuff. There was no manual, but it was just, we were in the wild West of digital photography.

We kind of came up with our own systems and as we came up with them, then I would realize, Oh, I can see that this is failing. And so we would change that. Try a different direction. And so by the time I started really working as a wedding photographer, as my own business, I already had all that kind of nailed down cause I practiced and worked on it on in a place that it really mattered.

Cause wedding photography, you know, if you're, if you're kind of disheveled and you're not organized, the only person you're really affecting is, you. Because you're costing yourself time, 

yeah, you're going to have to spend the next 12 hours finding the stuff, but it's you. But with commercial photography, we were photographing all of the images for PetSmart, all their catalogs and stuff.

So we were thousands of images. We're going into a catalog, and they had to be named correctly, and then the replacement had to be named correctly. That was back when they were using a program called Quark for page design. And so like in order to auto replace images with it from an FPO, which is a four position only image to the original image that was going to then replace it, had to be named perfectly, had to be put in the same folder, had it.

So we had to really nail down that process. And so it was kind of like I had a little bit of education in the, in the fire. I was thrown into the fire and I had to deal with it. But then as I, I realized that I was. Uniquely educated for that. Once I started going to wedding conferences, I remember the first time I went to a conference and that this was back when WPPI was here, but there was another conference called Pictage conferences, and this company Pictage put on these little conferences and I started going to those first, and I noticed that all of these people were just, every photographer was, No 1 they were all shooting JPEGs because they thought raw images were difficult. 

Alastair Jolly: Right. 

Jared Platt: I was like, I've never shot a JPEG. Like I wouldn’t do it. And so I was seeing people make mistakes all around me and I couldn't understand why they were making these mistakes.

But I had been educated in the commercial industry, and so when I came to weddings, I could see everybody's floundering because no one had a proper education on workflow, file management, and color depth and like all that stuff. They had no idea about. No one had taught them. So that's when I started teaching it.

So I just started putting my name in the ring for, Hey, I'll do a lecture on raw imagery, or on copyright or on, you know, I would just kind of put my hat in the ring. And so then I started with that, that process of going through the fire with the commercial studio. Then starting to teach people. Helped me to see how important it was to get it done quickly because I was getting things done pretty quickly to begin with.

And then I saw how much time people were really spending. And I remember the first time I started lecturing on the topic, I would, I would ask the audience, I would have them raise their hands. And those. You know, a thousand people in an auditorium. And I would have everybody raised their hand and say, okay, how many have your wedding photographers?

And so most of the place would raise their hand, cause it was at WPPI. And then I'd say, okay, how many of you, you know, shoot 3000 images on a wedding or 2000? And I would try and figure out, so then I would take the people and I'd say, okay, if you shot 3000 images, how long would it take you to process them?

I kind of started thinking three days, three days, two days. One day and people would, and some people weren't raising their hands and I'd be like, why aren't you raising your hand? You just said that you shot weddings. And I thought maybe these people can get it done as fast as I can. And it's like, you know, four hours or whatever, and they, and they were like, Oh, it takes me two months, or it takes me five days or it takes me two weeks.

And I was like, what is going on? Where for one wedding? And if that's what people are doing, number one, the bride can't be happy with them. And number two, what are you doing with your life? And I'll, I'll be the first to admit that I'm really busy. My work life balance is often off. Yeah. But it's not because I'm processing weddings.

It's because I'm traveling from place to place. 

Alastair Jolly: Yeah. 

Jared Platt: Because yeah, it's cause I'm writing an article or because I'm filming educational pieces or whatever, but it's not because I'm processing weddings. I think that people just, I don't think people recognize how much time they spend and how much that time is worth.

Yeah, because they really recognize the value of their time and they put like a number to it. You'd be better off working at a convenience store.

Alastair Jolly: If they analyzed their hourly rate for what they were making. It would be way below minimum wage. 

Jared Platt: You may make $500 an hour when you're shooting the wedding, but every hour you spend on that wedding after the wedding, you've just cut your hourly wage in half.

Yeah. And there's a lot of people that are making $10 an hour. 

Alastair Jolly: Definitely seen you demonstrate techniques that just were revolutionary for many people. Open their eyes to the power of the tools that we have, but the fact that there really isn't a manual there and unless people that you had worked out in and passed on that knowledge, people are just floundering and having a miserable time trying to try to do things that, you know, years ago we never had to do.

I mean, we outsourced all that stuff to the labs or whatever, and I'm still a big advocate for outsourcing. If yeah, if there's a part of, uh, your, your life that you don't like or part of your career that you don't like, you don't have to do it. Right. And you know, you can be a photographer. You don't have to be, uh, 

Jared Platt: an editor 

Alastair Jolly: or a book designer or you know, 

Jared Platt: you don't have to, you don't have to make a website.

You don't have to do your accounting. You don't have to print your own work. You don't have to adjust your own work. You don't have to cull your own work. Like there's a lot of stuff you can. Get rid of, and I think people don't take enough advantage of that kind of mentality. And that's the thing is that you said that these tools are important, but more important than the tools is the methodologies.

Because tools you can use. You can use Capture One, you could use Lightroom, you could use On1, you can use bridge, you can like, there's a whole bunch of tools that you can use. And all of those tools, some of them are better than others. Like I think Lightroom is probably the best of all of those tools.

But the other ones have merit in certain areas. So you can use all sorts of tools, but the methodology that you use is what actually increases the speed. That's what gets you through more quickly than the tool. Yeah. I mean, you got to have a tool that's functional. So for instance, using Canons, computer software that reads the files, I think it's called Canon Pro something or Canon professional image, I don't know.

Yeah. That is a tool that doesn't actually get the job done. And Nikon has a tool just like it, and Sony has a tool just like it. I don't know why any of them make that tool because it's, it's so vastly inferior to any other tool on the planet when it comes to reviewing and working on images. I mean, I can, I can find 12 free programs that do a better job than the camera makers software for reviewing their own images.

So I'm not sure why they even did you know that if you buy a Leica, you know what program comes to review the images? 

Alastair Jolly: No, I've never been fortunate enough to buy a Leica. 

Jared Platt: Adobe Lightroom. Yeah, because they recognize we're not a software company and we're not going to make software that's better than Adobe.

So let's just give them an Adobe product, right? So they say, buy a Leica, work on it in Lightroom. But Canon spends all of this money and effort and people and time to make a program that no one uses this. Not any good. Everybody uses Lightroom anyways. Yeah. You know, and occasionally you could probably get a better image out of the Canon software because they have their own proprietary algorithms and such, but anybody who worries about a like a 2% increase in the quality of a photo over spending the weekend with their kids. 

Alastair Jolly: Got their priorities wrong. 

Jared Platt: right there, you got your priorities wrong. And so all of these tools will work minus the actual camera makers tools cause they don't work. But all of these other tools will work.

But if you use the methodology, that's where you really see your ability to increase and your time increases because you're, you're not chasing the wrong avenue, you're not chasing the wrong methodology. And so that's the, that's the one thing that I've noticed, which has been very heartening over the last 10 years or so.

When I first started teaching and I started teaching my methods, it was like lights. People's brains were exploding. They were like, I can't believe that it was. It's okay. To select an image and not look at another image. So I talk about this concept of positive selection rather than going through and rejecting every image and only choose it.

I just taught people, just look at several images at a time, six images at a time or whatever, and let one jump out at you. If you like it and you zoom in and make sure that it's sharp, pick it and don't look at the rest of them.

Alastair Jolly: Is this better than that one? Is that one better than this?

Jared Platt: back and forth and go and doubting your decisions and stuff is it kills your time and you end up making worse decisions because you don't have any confidence in the decisions you're making.

But that kind of methodology wasn't prevalent 10 years ago. People were like shocked. By this idea, but I've noticed now as I teach people, the methodology has kind of sunk in a little bit more and people have started to like, I'll present that. And most of the people will be like, yeah, that makes sense.

It's not earth shattering. There are still those people out there that are like shocked by the idea. But I think that the shift has happened where people are starting to realize the right methodologies. They might not practice them. But you don't have to convince them that the methodologies are the right ones.

You just have to convince them to follow the methodology. So, you know, maybe 20 years from now, people will not have a difficult time processing their images because number one, the tools will get better. But number two, maybe that methodology will be ingrained in the industry so that this photographer teaches the next photographer, Hey, you know, don't waste your time on the rejects.

Just find the ones that jump out at you. 

Alastair Jolly: I never liked designing albums. I love to take photographs, love interacting with people, just found the whole album design thing, a real burden, and that's, that was one of the first things I outsourced in my business because there's this thing that I think photographers feel like they're not truly a photographer.

They need the validation of. Doing every part of the business. 

Like, I need to photograph, I need to build my website, I need to design my logo, I need to, you know, do the accounts. I need to do all the edits. And, you know, just recognize what your skillset is and, you know, don't 

Jared Platt: get rid of the, yeah. Yeah.

Alastair Jolly: Find a methodology or find the solution that allows you to concentrate on the stuff you love cause you'll be a much happier business owner and a much happier person and probably a much better professional to the clients if you're not bogged down by the parts of the industry that years ago we would never even considered doing.

We would never have built an album. We probably wouldn't have printed; I was never a printer. I was a photographer. 

Jared Platt: Right. So you sent it to the printer to be printed. And you sent your, your negatives to the lab to be developed and printed, and then you handed proofs, and then when it was time to print, you sent them to the printer again and he printed the negative.

And when it was time to make an album, you sent them to the timeline, whether craftsman or wherever, and then you would have them build an album for you. 

Alastair Jolly: Yeah. Uh, but that said, I do remember seeing the presentation you did, where you literally designed a wedding album in front of me in a matter of seconds.

And I was 

Jared Platt: thinking it was a lie. It was a five-minute album. I designed an album in five minutes. You know, the, the amazing thing is that, so that company that it's, uh, it's called smart albums. That company, I remember the first time I saw that tool and it was revolutionary because I was, I was in a. A little tiny conference in like Maine or something like that.

It was, I think it was mystic. Have you heard of the mystic conference? 

Alastair Jolly: Sounds familiar to, 

Jared Platt: So mystic is one of those small conferences, kind of like shutterfest and other things. And the mystic conferences were always really quite amazing actually, because this guy named Walter. He decided he wanted to make conference based on what he wanted to learn.

Right. He told me, he said, I invited the first conference. I invited everybody that I wanted to learn from to my conference, and then I invited other people to come to it. Right. And he's kind of like a kid. Walter's like a kid. He's just, he's, he's excited about everything he's doing, and he built this conference around that concept and it's the most fun.

Like entertaining small conference, like he did such a fantastic job and one year he invited me to come because he wanted to learn. You know, workflow from me. 

Alastair Jolly: So he had a vested interest in everyone he was bringing?

Jared Platt: So he brings me in and as I was walking by that of the little small trade show, and I walked by this company called smart albums, actually, I think the company's company is called pixelu.

Um, but anyway, smart albums is, the book is the product. And I walked past it and I was just, I was just walking past and I saw this tool in use. And it stopped me dead in my tracks. And it's not, it wasn't the tool that stopped me. It was the method that they were employing in the tool. So normally speaking, when you're doing an album, you would, you have a page and then you would grab images.

You drag them onto the page and then position them. But this tool, it was treating. The images, like a movie. And so you were, you were looking at this line of images that was in, in, you know, shot order. So based on the timeline, the chronological order, and as you saw break in the story, you would cut and then you would see, you know, five more images.

And then there's a break in the story. Like there's the shot where the bride is getting her dress on and her earring on, and she's putting a little lipstick on. And then. All of a sudden there's pictures of the groom. And so you just see it and you cut, and as soon as you made the cut, it would immediately take those images and auto design them into a spread.

And so that's why the, it was so easy to do it because you would just cut, cut, cut. So you would just have this lit, you know, 50 or 60 images on a line, and all you had to do was go through and cut from 

Alastair Jolly: this part of the story. This part, this 

Jared Platt: part, yes. Story, storyline, storyline. We'll just throw them up there.

And that was the brilliance of that tool because they were using a methodology. That made the process of getting the images from here to a blank page. Yeah. Cause it's the blank plate page that we're all afraid of. But as soon as you've made it a methodology that allowed people to just say, this is a story.

This is a story. This is a story. This is story. It could just throw them up there. Now there's a lot of different software out there that will design auto design. A page. A Lightroom does it in the book module, but it just does the whole book. You know, you highlight all your images and you auto fill and it fills the whole book.

So we could stop the right methodology. 

Alastair Jolly: It's like a paragraph with no grammar. It's just a paragraph. 

Jared Platt: Yeah, no punctuation. Just get it in there. And there's a Fundy, that's a brilliant program too, and it has a lot of really great methodologies in it as well. But it was this smart album that stopped me because I.

I had never seen that kind of method used, and it was the perfect method. So it got it delivered up to the page really fast. And so, so if I'm not going to outsource album design, I better use a serious designing program. And I think that, I think the two leaders in that are Fundy and smart albums and, and some people like fundy better, some people like smart albums better because of different.

Alastair Jolly: Little nuances or 

Jared Platt: little nuances or whatever, but that is almost as effective. Using one of those tools is almost as effective as outsourcing because it cuts the time. That's why for me to five minutes 

Alastair Jolly: and the pleasure of, 

Jared Platt: yeah, and that takes away pain. You're not, you're not apprehensive about doing it.

The process, 

Alastair Jolly: which can be stifling. When you're apprehensive of it, something you put it off, 

Jared Platt: put it off, put it off, and then it's a month later and then you're happy 

Alastair Jolly: that that presentation you did for us at the SmugMug booth was a wonderful presentation on how you could have your clients choose the favorites on your SmugMug gallery, import that gallery folder into your lightroom, right. Export from lightroom, the jpegs into a folder, which you then auto dropped into the smart albums. 

Jared Platt: Right. 

Alastair Jolly: It was just, it was wonderful to see. Just slick it off. 

Jared Platt: And that's the other thing is that that process, the process of getting from the client's decisions to actual production. Back in the day.

A long time ago, I had to actually print out the client's selections on a, like they would give me their selections and then I would have to go through, and I'd cross off. They want number eight and then I'd go find number eight and then they want number 12 and I go find number 12 and then they want them.

But SmugMug is one of those things that has a, it's a mind shift in process. And if you create that event and then, then the event. Anybody that goes in there, I can see inside of light rooms plugin. Yep. What they chose. So all I have to do is click on it and there they are, and then I just export those over here and then build the album.

So it's tools that have the right mindset and they have the right process that matter more than the slick tool that has the coolest feature. Yeah. You know, it's one of those ground up, I think people who build tools. Um, a lot of people build them backwards instead of thinking of the methodology first and then building a tool around the methodology.

They build a tool with a bunch of bells and whistles that has no methodology to it. I think capture one is one of those tools. It has tons of bells and whistles and it's a really slick program and it's very powerful, but there's no clear methodology. So no one in when they built that, and I think the reason is because they built it.

When it just paired to the phase one cameras and the whole goal was get the image from the phase one camera that had no card in it on a FireWire cable to the computer and let me adjust a raw image that was 

Alastair Jolly: Of a single shot. 

Jared Platt: Right. And that was it. That was the goal of that software. And now it's, it's increased over time to be able to do all sorts of things.

But something that like Lightroom was built with a methodology in mind. It was like, how do we. Create a seamless experience from start to finish so that a photographer can come in, review their images, keyword, their images, adjust their images, find their images, share their images, store their images, and now even go online with their images and connect with their mobile devices.

And. Share them to Instagram and whatever. How do we create that seamless experience? So there's, it's easy for a photographer to start to finish, open up one program, do it all. And even like in SmugMug's case, send it directly to SmugMug without our, I do, you know, I haven't gone to my SmugMug website in five years, 

Alastair Jolly: just do it all in Lightroom.

Jared Platt: I just, I don't even go there. I just, I, I get the link from Lightroom. It gives me the link. And so I just send that link to the client. 

Alastair Jolly: create the galleries, upload to the galleries. It's all there 

Jared Platt: whether I want them to be able to buy from it or not, or all of it's right there. And so there's a 

Alastair Jolly: pretty comprehensive program though.

Jared Platt: It's the, it literally is, I'm going to toot your horn right now, but it's, that plugin is the best plugin that exists in any program I've ever seen. It's the most useful might not be the most comprehensive, even though it is pretty comprehensive, but it's the most useful plugin. And I actually used to tell people the first time I saw that plugin and I started talking about it, I was like, if your website system, whatever it is, doesn't care enough about you.

To save you time by making a plugin like this. They don't deserve you, you know? Because it literally is, cause I can't think of something I hate more. I hate a lot of little activities. Like there's a lot of things I don't want to do, like for instance, accounting, but I can't think of an activity I dislike more than trying to build a website and trying to put images on a website.

I hate that. It's not something I want to do. I don't think anybody wants to do it. And so it's that ma. It's a matter of just finding tools that will save you grief from that. Yeah. And then outsourcing the stuff you can't find a tool for. 

Alastair Jolly: Well, I hope engineer David who, who built that plugin gets to hear this because he built an amazing product.

Jared Platt: He did. Yeah. 

Alastair Jolly: If, if people want to learn. And find out about this methodology in your workflow. There are various ways they could do it. You know, this is a bit where we get to toot your horn a little bit and about where people can go to learn these amazing techniques and methodologies that you have.

Where would you direct people to?

Jared Platt: Well. Oftentimes at conferences like this at WPPI, so that's in person. Oftentimes I'm at B&H photo or something like that, lecturing. I have a lot of content on creative live, so creativelive.com is a great place to find me. But then I also have content right at jaredplatt.com so Jaredplatt.com is kind of my one stop shop.

It's, it's my photography. It's where people hire me for photographs. It's also where people hire me to consult with them. It's also where people come and watch a workshops. I have an entire, I have a workshop there that has like 32 hours of Lightroom content at Jaredplatt.com. 

Alastair Jolly: So do you do it in person workshops for groups to come be with you in person?

Jared Platt: I, most of the time it's consultation thing where someone will hire me to come in and their business, get their workflow in order. And so they'll have all their assistants and all of their staff come in and we'll teach for a day or two. Usually the first day I come in and see how they operate, and then the second day I come in and teach them how to fix it.

Um, but then other times someone will say, Hey, I want to learn from you. And then they will just, they'll find the location or it'll be at their studio. And then I come in and everybody just comes in and then I teach a class to whoever shows up. Yeah. So there's a lot of ways that that gets done, but I probably do, I don't know, probably 10 or 20 individual consultations a year online or, or in person.

And then I probably do three or four training sessions for either companies or. Small groups of people. So yeah. And then I lecture all of them. 

Alastair Jolly: So if someone is interested jaridplatt.com is the main portal. 

Jared Platt: yep.

Alastair Jolly: You mentioned, I know a little bit, you're working on a very special project at the moment.

You work with Profoto correct? They are your lighting of choice, 

Jared Platt: that is my lighting of choice, 

Alastair Jolly: but you're working a rather special project with them.

Jared Platt:  This is a favorite project. Like, this is a project that I have been, so I, I got a wedding. I was hired to do a wedding that was going to be in The Bahamas on a little Island called Harbor Island in The Bahamas, and it's this special little magical Island.

It's tiny. And there was going to be 200 guests there, and it was such a perfect wedding where I knew that it was going to be a lot of challenging lighting conditions. You know, there's going to be bright sunny beaches. There was going to be a dark church. There was going to be a lot of stuff happening at night.

There's even one that the rehearsal dinner was out on a dock in the middle of the night. No lights. So how do you light that? Cause you can't bounce off the, you know, the lazy man's way of lighting or reception and just bounce off the ceiling and you've got light bouncing all over the place. You can't do that.

Alastair Jolly: You need some serious wattage for that one. 

Jared Platt: Yeah, right. Exactly. So bounce off the clouds, you know, 

Alastair Jolly: knowing the Bahamas was probably not. 

Jared Platt: Yeah, there were no clouds. So actually that night there were, cause it actually started to rain on them a little bit, sprinkled a little bit, but it turned out fine. Anyway. So it's this, it was a great wedding that was going to have so many components to it. And so we got the client's permission to film, and it's a real wedding, which is very unique because most of the time when you go and you, you watch a, a quote unquote wedding. Workshop or someone's teaching how to do a wedding. It's not a real wedding. It's a wedding, either with a model or it's so wedding, a stylized wedding where they put it together or they just gave someone a free wedding so that they would do it, but they're stopping and they're teaching in the middle of it.

And so it's, it's hard to see it as a real wedding because they're actually talking to the camera and there. This is an absolutely real wedding. Real clients. It's, I was hired to do it, but they just gave me permission to do B roll. So my two videographers were there capturing the wedding and how it was happening and kind of paying attention to what I was using and how the lights were set up and that kind of stuff.

And so then when we came home from the wedding, then we went into the studio and we started explaining the wedding. As we're looking at the B roll, explaining where the lights are, how it's set up, what kind of power we're using on the lights, what was the method for setting up the lights and, and how we were dealing with the client and, and when the client changes their mind and wants to do something else or doesn't want to go down to the beach, how do you deal with that?

Issue and how do you change midstream? 

Alastair Jolly: What were the problems you have to solve? What were the compromises? 

Jared Platt: Right? Shooting the ring shots, shooting the details, shooting in dark circumstances. There's even a point where we're shooting at a portrait of 200 people at the wedding. How do you, how do you light a 200 person portrait at sunset?

That's a, it's a, that's a huge challenge. And so all of these things are then encapsulated into one wedding workshop where we literally just take you through an entire wedding and show you how each shot was done, what the methodology behind location scouting, all that kind of stuff. It's cool. Yeah. It's a really interesting project and that will be, yeah, that'll be on pro photos educational site shop site, which is prophoto.com/education 

Alastair Jolly: right? So go check that out. See something. It seems like it’s going to be quite exceptional insight into a real wedding and 

Jared Platt: it was on there and it's a project now. Almost a year in the making. 

Alastair Jolly: So do you know when that goes live? 

Jared Platt: April, 2020 is when the site, when the English version of it will come, and then after that they translated into, I think Japanese and Spanish and German and some other languages.

Alastair Jolly: Wonderful looking forward to looking at that. Even though I'm not shooting weddings anymore, I still love to 

Jared Platt: see. It's pretty cool. Anyway, yeah, it's a great, great little workshop. Great. 

Alastair Jolly: Well. Jared, I knew I was going to enjoy this conversation, I have really been looking forward to for a long time and hoping that we could cross paths and get this conversation done.

Thank you so much for giving us the time, given us an insight into your career, what you're currently up to, and you know, I wish you all the best for all these various projects that you have on and yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure. 

Jared Platt: Well, hopefully the next time I see you, we'll be in Glasgow. Come visit you.

Alastair Jolly: Let's do that. Alright. 

Jared Platt: Whats the name of the town is? 

Alastair Jolly: It's just outside Falkirk called Bonnybridge. It's 

Jared Platt: Bonnybridge? 

Alastair Jolly: it's a very Scottish, 

Jared Platt: that's perfect of that that that makes me want to visit even more is that I want to sing a song about, it comes down to Bonnie bridge 

Alastair Jolly: or I think we have to stop now Jared, thanks again.

It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you everybody for listening and look forward to catching up with you all again on the next episode. 

Jared Platt: Thanks.